Hi all, my name is Andy Bailey and I am a student currently studying my second year of 'Digital Films, Games and Animation,' at Leeds College of Art. This blog will document both my progression with the set modules throughout the year, and also personal development within my chosen area of study (concept art for games).

Monday, 19 November 2012

Lately I have been doing quiet a bit of experimenting in Photoshop in order to develop in my chosen area of study. Firstly, as my band are set to record a four track EP very soon, I thought I would design a sleeve to accompany the CD. As the genre is classic rock/blues, I thought I would go for a traditional airbrush look. I wanted to produce something very loud and flamboyant, so I went for a colossal storm towering over a country landscape. This fits with the band name 'Supercell' which is the title given to a very large and dangerous storm. I was inspired by the classic rock album cover 'Rainbow Rising':

As you can see the design is very epic in scope, which is what I aimed to achieve with my sleeve artwork. To produce the Supercell in the distance, I experimenting with creating my own custom brush. I used various reference images found on the web to get an accurate feel for how the storm would look and be lit. I experimented a lot with the bottom of the image. At first the ground took up two much space so I lowered it to better consider the rule of thirds. This also emphasised the scale and dominance of the storm. I also tweaked the colours from green to a more brownish tint, achieving a more rustic look better fitting with the sky. I also transformed the perspective to create the illusion of a lower shot looking across the road and fields, making the storm feel even more towering. I added the old wind turbine in later to complete the composition. It just felt a bit bare, and the image needed some other subject to tie everything together. I also added a glare creeping through the gaps in the foreground to give the sense that an intense backlight is leaking through the image. Again, composition wise this helps unite the foreground with the backdrop without loosing too much contrast. I also added type at the top of the sleeve using the simple and crisp 'myriad pro' typeface and added a film grain using the noise and gaussian blur filters:

When I look at this image I think of the phrase 'calm before the storm'. The foreground is very tranquil and static, with the soft sunlight making it seem almost peaceful, yet there is this impending giant dominating the backdrop. I feel it creates a nice juxtapose.

I have dubbed this second character concept piece 'Prime':

As I had been playing the new 'Halo 4' game, I was inspired to create a very robust 'Master Chief' style soldier. I began blocking out the anatomy and shapes within the armour very quickly and loosely to get the creative ball rolling. Next I defined the armour with strong line art. I also wanted to add textures to the armour. For this I created repeating patterns and applied them on separate layers over the original colour layer. I then created quick layer masks around the shape of the Prime. I then broke the connection between the pattern layers and mask layers, and warped the patterns to fit the shape of the Prime's body. Overall the process was fairly quick. This is rewarding as one of my main aims is to build up an efficient workflow to produce satisfactory art in shorter spaces of time.

In conclusion, with the EP cover art it was nice to break away from my often Sci-fi fuelled game-art style and try and produce something more traditional looking. I feel the image offered good practice with colour selection and value control. I will probable produce a back and inside to the sleeve in the very near future. The 'Prime' concept works as a very clear character design. Perhaps in the future I could go back and add more shading and highlights to give the image more depth, however, I am very happy with the human anatomy and the speed at which the digital art was created. With both paintings, I am beginning to develop smoother and more efficient methods, meaning that my workflow is gradually speeding up. I hope to be spending more time on detailing with custom brushes as my work progresses.

Sunday, 18 November 2012

From my loose designs, I found an image I was happy with. I decided on the vessel seen from behind. I simply took this image and produced a turnaround sheet to take into maya and use as reference:

As I mentioned in previous posts, our team is having to generalise and span out of our comfort zones as our skill sets don't comfortably span across all areas of the process. This meant that I made a very messy first attempt at modelling this vessel:

As you can see from the screenshot, the edge isn't too great. Some of the shapes have more than 4 sides, a law I didn't quite grasp when creating this first effort. Also when smoothed, you can see some small gaps indicating that some of the edges are not merged. The modelling here is generally scrappy and untidy.

For my second attempt, I started simple, blocking out the basic shape of the shuttle. From this I began adding edge loops, constantly keeping edge flow in mind . I added in more edge loops on edges I wanted to be square, and when smoothed, the results were much better. For the unwrapping process, I used methods taken from our previous alien workshop. However, I found that as the ship is less organic than our biped, some of the flat faces required projecting separately. For the texture itself, I added in wet media brushes from the photoshop presets, along with the smudge tool set to a scratchy nature brush, to try and create the illusion of dints and scrapes on the shell of the vessel:

When considering the animation of the ship, to some extent I wanted it to move like a large water dwelling mammal. I didn't design the ship in segments, as I didn't want to make it seem too organic and move away from the idea of a space shuttle. This means that all the expression is in the fins. I made a quick you tube visit and found footage of a whale swimming for reference:

I created three animations: An evasive manoeuvre where the ship banks quickly from side to side, a swimming motion where the ship propels itself forwards with it fins and a simple animation where the ship is cruising using the jet engines on its rear. I wanted to keep the animation slow and graceful like the Humpback whale in the video. After completed the animations, I exported an FBX file into Unity and created a turntable. Initially I had a problem with the right set of fins. Although in Maya after checking all of the faces were facing out correctly, when exported some of the geometry flipped. To fix this I simply reversed the culprit faces in maya, causing them to be flipped the correct way when exported. I experimented with some specular bump mapping, which I only wanted to be applied to the cockpit shield. Using a normal map, I found I was only able to control how much bump was added to the desired area. As the main ship is all one piece of geometry, I will have to figure out a way to make only glass appear reflective. For now, here is a turntable of the animated ship:Unity Web Player | Whale_first_turntable